Marc Sollberger

• Assistant Professor
• University Center for Medicine of Aging Basel Felix Platter / University Hospital Basel

The association of Swiss Memory Clinics (SMC) provides intersocietal recommendations for the use of anti-amyloid monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) in Switzerland. The recommendations are the result of extensive interdisciplinary discussions in a group of Swiss dementia experts from August 2023 until December 2024. They reflect the opinion of all societi...

Background: Harmonising assessment for neurocognitive disorders (NCDs) is an urgent priority for both clinical settings and research. In 2022, we launched the SIGNATURE initiative with the aim to harmonize and optimise the use of socio-cognitive assessments in NCDs. Hereby, we report findings from the first phase of the initiative including the eva...

Background Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) is a debilitating chronic disease of significant public health and clinical importance. It affects multiple systems in the body and has neuro-immunological characteristics. The disease is characterized by a prominent symptom called post-exertional malaise (PEM), as well as abnor...

Background: Harmonisation of evidence-based neuropsychological protocols among different countries represents a priority for the benefit of researchers, clinicians and most importantly patients. Currently, no consensus on a uniform operationalization of socio-cognitive measures for neurocognitive disorders (NCDs) in memory clinics exists. The inter...

Background: We analysed differences in protein concentrations in human blood serum depending on the tube material, and the immunoassay platform used. Materials & Methods: Blood samples from study participants were collected in glass and polypropylene tubes (n=292). Serum concentrations of six proteins (BDNF, IGF-1, VEGF-A, TGF-ß1, MCP-1, and IL-18...

Aims: At present, there is no consensus on a uniform operationalization of social cognition measures for the diagnosis of neurocognitive disorders (NCDs) in memory clinics. To overcome this limitation, the international consortium "clinical use of SocIal coGNnition measures for the AssessmenT of neURocognitivE disorders'' (SIGNATURE) has been estab...

Background and objectives Early-stage behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) is often misdiagnosed, highlighting the need for new diagnostic instruments. Based on the revised diagnostic criteria for bvFTD, we developed the Behavioural Dysfunction Questionnaire (BDQ). In this explorative study, we aimed to determine the best scoring and...

At present, there is no consensus on a uniform operationalization of social cognition measures for the diagnosis of neurocognitive disorders (NCDs) in memory clinics. To overcome this limitation, the international consortium "clinical use of SocIal coGNnition measures for the AssessmenT of neURocognitivE disorders'' (SIGNATURE) has been established...

Impairments of Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities occur in a wide range of brain disorders. Therefore, reliable and ecologically valid examination of these abilities is a crucial part of any comprehensive neuropsychological assessment. An established and ecologically valid, English‐language test identifying deficits in ToM abilities is “The Awareness o...

Zusammenfassung: Die Untersuchung sozial-kognitiver Fähigkeiten kann zur Diagnostik kognitiver Störungen beitragen. In diesem Zusammenhang stellt sich die Frage, inwieweit sozial-kognitive Fähigkeiten in deutschsprachigen Memory-Kliniken (MK) untersucht werden. Wir führten dazu eine Befragung in 87 deutschsprachigen MK in Deutschland, Österreich un...

Importance: One characteristic histopathological event in Alzheimer disease (AD) is cerebral amyloid aggregation, which can be detected by biomarkers in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and on positron emission tomography (PET) scans. Prevalence estimates of amyloid pathology are important for health care planning and clinical trial design. Objective:...

Objective: Emotion recognition (ER) is commonly impaired in many brain disorders. Therefore, its reliable and ecologically valid examination is a crucial part of any comprehensive neuropsychological assessment. In this regard, an established English-language test identifying deficits in ER is "The Awareness of Social Inference Test-Emotion Evaluat...

The Memory Centres of several Swiss hospitals have set up a national online registry for Alzheimer's research, called www.BHR-suisse.org. This type of registry already exists in the United States (www.brainhealthregistry.org/) and the Netherlands (https://hersenonderzoek.nl/). It contributes, as do these initiating sites, to the creation of a globa...

Les centres de la mémoire de plusieurs hôpitaux suisses ont créé un Registre national suisse en ligne pour la recherche sur Alzheimer, intitulé www.bhr-suisse.org. Ce type de registre existe déjà aux États-Unis (www.brainhealthregistry.org/) et aux Pays-Bas (hersenonderzoek.nl/). Il contribue, au même titre que ces sites initiateurs, à constituer u...

We characterize the whole-brain N-acetyl-aspartate (WBNAA) and brain tissue fractions across the adult lifespan and test the hypothesis that, despite age-related atrophy, neuronal integrity (reflected by WBNAA) is preserved in normal aging. Two-hundred-and-seven participants: 133 cognitively intact older adults (73.6 ± 7.4 mean ± standard deviation...

Background The way we interact with each other is influenced by how we perceive and evaluate socioemotional signals and adapt our interpersonal behavior to them (Lieberman, 2007). In this study, we investigated the neurostructural substrates of two key aspects of interpersonal behavior: socioemotional sensitivity and behavioral self‐management, usi...

Background There is evidence that age and context (e.g. stimuli presentation) influence the way we perceive emotions (Barrett, Mesquita & Gendron, 2011; Stanley & Isaacowitz, 2015). We investigated whether there is an age‐dependent context effect on the perception of static facial emotions. Method In this cross‐sectional study, 240 cognitively and...

In October 2019, a Swiss panel of experts met for the Dementia Summit in Brunnen, Switzerland, to discuss the latest scientific findings on basic and clinical research, as well as practical and political approaches to the challenges of dementia disorders in Switzerland. Here, we present the conference summary. To study pathophysiological changes,...

Serial Position Effects (SPE) in wordlist learning provide a rich set of metrics of cognitive functioning. In this study, we systematically mapped the neuroanatomical correlates of SPEs across delays in Major and Minor Neurocognitive disorders. Primacy, middle, and recency SPE scores of the California Verbal Learning Test at Learning, Short delay,...

Tau is a microtubule stabilizing protein that forms aggregates in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Tau derived from AD patients’ brains induces tau aggregation in a prion-like manner when injected into susceptible mouse models. Here we investigated whether cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) collected from patients diagnosed with probable AD or mild cognitive impai...

Connectivity in intrinsically connected networks (ICNs) may predict individual differences in cognition and behavior. The drastic alterations in socioemotional awareness of patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) are presumed to arise from changes in one such ICN, the salience network (SN). We examined how individual differ...

Objective: Misdiagnosis of early behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) with major depressive disorder (MDD) is not uncommon due to overlapping symptoms. The aim of this study was to improve the discrimination between these disorders using a novel facial emotion perception task. Method: In this prospective cohort study (July 2013-Mar...

Objective: Features of behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) such as executive dysfunction, apathy, and impaired empathic abilities are also observed in major depressive disorder (MDD). This may contribute to the reason why early stage bvFTD is often misdiagnosed as MDD. New assessment tools are thus needed to improve early diagnosis...

The importance of including measures of emotion processing, such as tests of facial emotion recognition (FER), as part of a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment is being increasingly recognized. In clinical settings, FER tests need to be sensitive, short, and easy to administer, given the limited time available and patient limitations. Curre...

Background Several cognitive, neuroimaging, and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) markers predict conversion from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to Alzheimer's disease (AD) dementia. However, predictors might be more or less powerful depending on the characteristics of the MCI sample. Objective To investigate which cognitive markers and biomarkers predic...

Background Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is an intermediary state on the way to Alzheimer's disease (AD). Little is known about whole brain concentration of the neuronal marker, N-acetylaspartate (NAA) in MCI patients. Objective To test the hypothesis that since MCI and AD are both neurodegenerative, quantification of the NAA in their whole brai...

Accurate self-awareness is essential for adapting one's tasks and goals to one's actual abilities. Patients with neurodegenerative diseases, particularly those with right frontal involvement, often present with poor self-awareness of their functional limitations that may exacerbate their already jeopardized decision-making and behaviour. We studied...

Background Neuroimaging studies examining neural substrates of impaired self-awareness in patients with neurodegenerative diseases have shown divergent results depending on the modality (cognitive, emotional, behavioral) of awareness. Evidence is accumulating to suggest that self-awareness arises from a combination of modality-specific and large-sc...

Supplementary Material.

Scatterplot of the Main effects' peak voxel's gray matter (GM) volumes at the right inferior temporal gyrus (60/6/–34) and empathic concern discrepancy score, adjusting for age, gender, MMSE, and TIV, using STATA 9.2.

It is unclear whether the predictive strength of established cognitive variables for progression to Alzheimer's disease (AD) dementia from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) varies depending on time to conversion. We investigated which cognitive variables were best predictors, and which of these variables remained predictive for patients with longer t...

Diffusion imaging is a promising marker of microstructural damage in neurodegenerative disorders, but interpretation of its relationship with underlying neuropathology can be complex. Here, we examined both volumetric and brain microstructure abnormalities in 13 amnestic patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), who progressed to probable Alzh...

Introduction Lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A2 (Lp-PLA2) is a circulating enzyme with pro-inflammatory and oxidative activities associated with cardiovascular disease and ischemic stroke. While high plasma Lp-PLA2 activity was reported as a risk factor for dementia in the Rotterdam study, no association between Lp-PLA2 mass and dementia or Al...

N-acetylaspartate (NAA) is an index of neuronal integrity. We hypothesized that in healthy subjects its whole brain concentration (WBNAA) may be related to formal educational attainment, a common proxy for cognitive reserve. To test this hypothesis, 97 middle aged to elderly subjects (51-89 years old, 38% women) underwent brain magnetic resonance i...

Successful navigation of the social world requires the ability to recognize and track emotions as they unfold and change dynamically. Neuroimaging and neurological studies of emotion recognition have primarily focused on the ability to identify the emotion shown in static photographs of facial expressions, showing correlations with the amygdala as...

Self-conscious emotions such as embarrassment arise when one's actions fail to meet salient social expectations and are accompanied by marked physiological and behavioral activation. We investigated the neural correlates of self-conscious emotional reactivity in 27 patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), a neurodegenerativ...

We hypothesize that normal aging implies neuronal durability, reflected by age-independent concentrations of their marker--the amino acid derivative N-acetylaspartate (NAA). To test this, we obtained the whole-brain and whole-head N-acetylaspartate concentrations (WBNAA and WHNAA) with proton magnetic resonance (MR) spectroscopy; and the fractional...

N-acetylaspartate (NAA) is an index of neuronal integrity. We hypothesized that in healthy subjects its whole brain concentration (WBNAA) may be related to formal educational attainment, a common proxy for cognitive reserve. To test this hypothesis, 97 middle aged to elderly subjects (51-89 years old, 38% women) underwent brain magnetic resonance i...

Introduction: Changes in personality differ qualitatively and quantitatively among patients with different neurodegenerative diseases, likely due to divergent patterns of regional neurodegeneration. Regional damage to circuits underlying various cognitive and emotional functions have been associated with interpersonal traits like dominance, extrav...

Different degenerative brain diseases result in distinct personality changes as a result of divergent patterns of brain damage; however, little is known about the natural history of these personality changes throughout the course of each disease. To investigate how interpersonal traits change as a function of degenerative brain disease type and sev...

Social cognitive neuroscience is a novel field of interdisciplinary research that examines socio-emotional cognition and behavior by emphasizing the neural substrates of these processes. Insights from this biological perspective have established that socio-emotional processing does not happen in a sequential order but in a recursive and interlinked...

Introduction: Lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A 2 (Lp-PLA 2) is a circulating enzyme with pro-inflammatory and oxidative activities associated with cardiovascular disease and ischemic stroke. While high plasma Lp-PLA 2 activity was reported as a risk factor for dementia in the Rotterdam study, no association between Lp-PLA 2 mass and dementia...

Our purpose was to measure Abeta(1-42), T-tau and P-tau(181) in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of patients with posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), a presenile dementia likely to represent a variant of Alzheimer's disease (AD). CSF samples from 34 subjects including 9 patients with PCA, 11 age-matched patients with AD and 14 age-matched cognitively he...

Several functional and structural imaging studies have investigated the neural basis of personality in healthy adults, but human lesions studies are scarce. Personality changes are a common symptom in patients with neurodegenerative diseases like frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and semantic dementia (SD), allowing a unique window into the neural basi...

While sarcasm can be conveyed solely through contextual cues such as counterfactual or echoic statements, face-to-face sarcastic speech may be characterized by specific paralinguistic features that alert the listener to interpret the utterance as ironic or critical, even in the absence of contextual information. We investigated the neuroanatomy und...

The functional importance of the basal lamina in Schwann cell development and in adult peripheral nerve fibers is well known. We have demonstrated previously by confocal microscopy that IgM deposits are present on the basal lamina of myelinating Schwann cells of nerve biopsies from patients with an anti-MAG IgM neuropathy. Therefore, the basal lami...